Hip-Hop’s Elders and Youth Go to Battle (Again)

Lil Yachty, in November. Does the hip-hop artist know any songs by the Notorious B.I.G.? This question and others are discussed in the Popcast.CreditClement Pascal for The New York Times

By The New York Times

Jan. 13, 2017

The Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica, pop music critic for The New York Times. It covers the latest in pop music criticism, trends and news.

Does Lil Yachty know any songs by the Notorious B.I.G.? Should Lil Uzi Vert rap over a DJ Premier beat? Is mumbling — what some people refer to as mumbling, at least — a viable form of rapping?

Like any genre, hip-hop has its own internal culture wars, and the last few months have been overrun by them, with purist conservatives taking aim at a younger generation of rappers gloriously and exuberantly disconnected from the genre’s traditions.

But it’s important to remember, in these fraught times, that hip-hop policing itself is nothing new. It happened in the mid-to-late 1990s, when independent wings sprang up as a rejoinder to the genre’s newfound commercial potency. It happened when New York developed anxiety about ascendant scenes in California or in the South. It happened when MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice took streamlined hip-hop to the pop charts in the early 1990s and were widely mocked.

This week on the Popcast, Mr. Caramanica discussed hip-hop’s current generation-gap struggles, and its history of aesthetic panics, with Minya Oh, better known as Miss Info, the proprietor of the hip-hop news website MissInfo.tv and formerly a regular presence on Hot 97; Craig Jenkins, the pop music critic of New York magazine; and Max Weinstein, news editor at XXL, the hip-hop magazine and website.